It began when I was slithering down one of the Sukhumvit streets on the rare pained occasion that an out-of-doors sojourn to any place at all is less of a tedium than what the paradisiacal inner world, well-curated and well-crafted, has to offer — the svelte and tenuous world of different registers and flavours, of diverse undertones and overtones, of tenors and strains, of wits and wisecracks, of whims and whams, of gustoes and pathos, of thoughts and themes that irrevocably bind one to the ethereal and the historical and the threads athirst to bridge them. But the miserly world of the senses, of the mere sluice of sensory experiences — without any intellectual content or logical coherence or aesthetic unity — is, to many, supposed to inspire a sort of vivacity, electrify an amperage, or douse astir those dullards and deadheads without any inscape, being two-part bland and three-part blech.
Alas, I am periodically exposed to the elements and a happy felicity has re-introduced a familiar tune to my ears. A jazzy saxophone rendition of a contemporary Thai ballad, an old record released during my early years of youth, and as such, had a reminiscent stronghold on me. It is not an august tune, nor is it a spell-binding one. Extremely poor in influences, its tendency merely rounds out the extent of its potentiality afforded by the limited mediums and expedients. One happily evinces neither a start nor a sursaut at the hearing of it. No wrenching in the heart nor whirling in the head. A simple linear progression through a passage of varying pitches.
But atop the trusses and the columns are, if one is blessed with enough acuity and fortune to witness, a perched pediment, a crowning capstone, a vestal spire. There is a saying in German, regarding a certain hygienic and aesthetic practice common among men, that a tree without the surrounding copses is well-disposed to appear more estimable i.e. more towering than its veritable height. The opposite is true for a height of a remarkable presence — one tails off more favourably amidst the frigidity and foppery of the poppy stumps. The more flagging the outlying undergrowth, the less bounteous the land, the more staggering the sight. What would sufficiently explain the seminal growth, the outsized canopy, the fructifying frondescence, in an expanse where others do not grow beyond the height of a stubble? What is the alchemy, a legerdemain even, that fuses and enkindles in a barely tepid cauldron a grandee beyond its kith and kin?
The auteur of the original composition turns out to be such a grandee: a Thai musical prodigy. A Thai prodigy, you clamour? What an oxymoron! A barefaced putrefying verisimilitude! A country that venerates jackboots and thundercunts, that slavers at pissants and pinchbecks, that prostates at the behest of worthless old maids and senescent dotards, a country whose hatred and envy towards their children, nay towards their fellow human beings, could scorch the earth twice over — how could such a self-defeating, self-hating, self-immolating nation ever produce a genius of any standing?
How could such a scurvy excuse of a culture — for vainglorious culture requires commensurate pretense, however slight, to some form of moral edification or spiritual purification; a culture which desires, demands and relishes no more and no less than the total and thorough destruction of those under its aegis to whom its existence is beholden; a culture which commits, celebrates and consecrates in blazing offense a universal malefaction against an amour propre of any and all statures, in each and every of its stations, with a malevolence that is its plinth, with a malediction that would be summoned with a stinky, milk-lipped scowl under the staid veil of hoary wisdom — produce a single fecund head of illimitable and formidable greatness? How could such folks, bereft of an inner patois or a mediated outpour characteristic of an enlightened culture, amount to anything beyond the impulse-bound, muck-bemired, tear-bedewed scatological-suds that is their lives? What would they know of a genuine actuation towards the higher and nobler world of mental summits? Of joyous revelry, fervid enthusiasm and intellectual ecstasy? Of the most cheerful wisdom and the principled achievement of the highest order?
Epilogue
‘The Roaring Twenties,’ both Twenties — a fated dalliance, a renascent rebirth of that bygone decade which symbolises freedom, prosperity, creativity, culture and progress — has filled my mind with hopeful longing, not in the least evoking a fanciful allusion to the possibility of the third unheralded era: my Twenties. Indeed what a marvelous decade! Marvelous in (spite of) all its trances and turmoils, all its trials and trepidations, all its thralldom and triviality and temerity.
Who could ever foretell that I, the least copacetic and most captious of all, would one day slough the swarthy sheen for the sanguine shine? That I would, with all my wits about me, choose to luxuriate in the lambent lights and lofty aspirations of the yonder future? Upon witnessing the divine fervour of bravura extraordinaire…
Salisa lohavittayavikant 